Kuwait Oil Refinery May Restart Fully in Three Days (Update1)
By Yee Kai Pin
July 31, 2009 (Bloomberg) — Kuwait’s Mina Al-Ahmadi oil refinery may return to full operations within three days after a storage tank fire led to a shutdown yesterday, according to a person familiar with the operations.
The refinery is operating today at about 40 percent to 60 percent of its 460,000 barrel-a-day capacity, the person said. A fault in a water cooler unit caused the fire, the official Kuwait News Agency reported yesterday, citing state-owned Kuwait National Petroleum Co.
The 60-year-old refinery, the largest of three in the country, has 29 units including three crude-distillation units and a fluid catalytic cracker that makes gasoline, according to Kuwait National’s Web site.
Telephone messages to the company weren’t immediately answered, as today is part of the weekend in Kuwait.
To contact the reporter on this story: Yee Kai Pin in Singapore at kyee13@bloomberg.net